Welcoming Jack Grigg

When Zooko first excitedly exclaimed he had been in contact with Jack about working with us, I’ll admit the name wasn’t familiar to me. It turns out, that’s because I was only familiar with his superhero alter-ego: str4d.

Jack Grigg aka str4d

By day, Jack is an applied physics PhD student, and by night, a privacy-focused crypto hacker. At Real World Crypto ’16, str4d made the bold step of unmasking this pseudonym.

I first became aware of str4d as a contributor on the integration of privacy-preserving network protocols such as Tor and I2P into foolscap, a capabilities-secure remote procedure call Python library and protocol. Under this pseudonym, Jack actively contributes to or leads development on I2P, I2P Android, and the txi2p endpoint for Twisted, as well as ed25519-java.

All of this has been in addition to his by-day work as a physics student where he’s working on a thesis about sheep’s wool. A true polyglot, Jack’s been settling in quite naturally on our team. His first task is to create a mining prototype for Zcash [*]. Please join us in welcoming Jack Grigg aka str4d out of the crypto-closet and into wondrous land of cryptocurrency.